


On Eggshells

by tawg



Series: Hawkeyes and Handlers [1]
Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Date Night, Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Other, character being triggered, early stages of an established relationship, post-mission aftercare, this is a weird place to start a series but tbh I haven't written the 'getting together' fic yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 20:37:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a rough mission, Phil needs to unwind. The Hawkeyes are trying to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Eggshells

There are Hawkeyes in Phil’s apartment when he gets home. He has his jacket in his hand, and his tie stuffed into his jacket pocket, and his studio apartment is warm when he unlocks the door because it is filled with Hawkeyes.

Four days out of state on the job, and then two full days in assorted windowless rooms debriefing one mission and preparing another and generally dealing with the usual SHIELD chaos. Phil is not exactly at his best in that moment. He’d been looking forward to his bed, to flopping into it and not moving for a day. Clint’s in the bed, shirtless and looking sleep rumpled and frowning at a magazine. Phil tries to decide whether that means that the bed is taken, or whether the bed will be warm and comfortable. Clint is the octopus of the trio, Kate is the one with pointy elbows. Phil doesn’t know what his own sleep profile is. He tends to shove the covers off during the night, caught between two warm bodies who do not appreciate being stripped of their outer layers at four in the morning. Clint had just put a second blanket on his bed, and now when Phil stays over he wakes up with a burrito-blanketed archer on either side.

Phil knows that food will need to be happening in the future. He tries to tell himself that the presence of Hawkeyes implies that the fridge will be stocked, that it is not in fact a sign that everything in his apartment has been consumed and that Kate has a shopping list prepared for him. If he gets handed a shopping list in the next five minutes, his apartment is going to become an aggressively Hawkeye-free zone.

Kate looks over at him, up to her elbows in dirty dishes and bubbles and rubber gloves that are a completely predictable colour, and leans against the counter, smiles a bit. “Good, you’re home.”

Phil finally manages to stumble inside and kick the door closed behind him. He considers travelling the rest of the way to the bed and flomping on it, but Clint is carefully not looking up from his magazine and Kate is drying her hands on a dishtowel.

“Go get cleaned up,” she says as she pulls his jacket from his hand. “You’re taking me out.”

Phil raises his eyebrows and gives Clint a pointed look that is thoroughly ignored, before looking to Kate for an explanation. “Shower,” she instructs. “And it wouldn’t kill you to shave.”

Phil huffs, and tells himself that showering was on his to-do list anyway. There’s dirt under his nails and in his socks and worked into the borrowed shirt he’s wearing, and he lets Kate propel him into the small bathroom. It’s perhaps cleaner than it was before he left but definitely more cluttered. There are new towels crammed onto the towel rack. Kate and Clint always bring a towel with them when they stay and they always leave it behind, and Phil doesn’t understand the habit at all because —he has towels—. An increasing number of them. There’s a small stack of them growing beside his entertainment system because he’s run out of room for towels in his cupboards. He has no idea what it means. Perhaps Clint just forgets that Phil has towels. Possibly Kate thinks it’s a wonderful joke to always come prepared. Probably Phil will never know for sure.

He uses Clint’s body wash, bright green gel with a promise towards invigorating attributes plastered over the bottle. It smells like mint and lime, and Phil pauses for a moment with the bottle open under his nose because he’s fairly certain that Clint has never smelled like this. Kate’s body buffer is rough and scratchy against Phil’s skin, but it’s perfect for scrubbing away the days since his last shower, the time away from the sunlight, the feeling of his job soaking into his skin. There’s a slice of his chest that is spared the treatment and his movements aren’t as brisk as they could be but little bruises of reality are easily covered by the lather of the gel. He rinses the tough little plastic sponge out and then rubs it over his body again, washing away the obnoxious smell of the body wash and leaving his skin pink and clean. 

He drops his clothes into the laundry basket, dries himself off with slow, lethargic movements – rough with his body but taking special care with his hands because they’re gloves of history that can’t easily be hidden – and finally wraps a towel around his waist when Kate bangs on the bathroom door and tells him that Clint needs to pee. He opens the door to let the steam out, wipes a clear patch on the mirror and shaves with care. He’s too old to cut his face open just because he’s exhausted. He can see Clint’s reflection in the mirror, digging through the mess of Hawkeye clothes on the floor. Every now and then he’ll pick a shirt up and sniff it, and then check it for stains. Phil is convinced that Clint is going to have to compromise on one of those standards or go out shirtless, when Kate hurls a purple tee at Clint’s head. 

“You done yet, princess?” Kate asks as Phil washes the last of the shaving foam off his face.

“Just trying to look pretty for you,” he calls back. Kate snorts, and Clint throws a sock at her, and Phil brushes his teeth quickly with the sounds of a small scuffle in the background. They’re superheroes but they’re also insufferable children. The thought makes him pause. He really just wants to sleep for a day. He gets out of the bathroom before the Hawkeyes team up on him.

His underwear drawer is nearly empty of underpants, and Phil shoots Clint an unimpressed look. Clint points to his own jockeys, and then jabs his finger at Kate. She’s crouching down and sorting through her shoulder bag, and Phil can see the elastic band of his own black briefs above the top of her pants. Phil shakes his head and digs deeper through his drawer. 

Clint slouches himself into blue jeans and the purple tee. Kate is wearing dark purple pants and a tight blue top. Phil feels oddly morbid in black pants and a dark grey v-neck shirt, his black wool coat only making him look more sombre. Kate drapes her purple scarf around his neck and pulls on her leather jacket. Clint slips into a grey hooded jacket with a target on the left breast. Phil hates the fashion trend of targets on clothing – why give anyone the encouragement to hit you where it hurts? Why make it easy to — But there’s something soft and playful about Clint’s wardrobe. Like he’s always thinking about the job and whatever clothes he shoves into his basket at Target reflects that. Phil is sure that his own preoccupation with his job is nowhere near as endearing.

“So where are we taking you tonight, little miss?” Phil asks in a quiet, scratchy voice as they walk down the front steps of his apartment building, Kate in the lead because she has her car keys in her hand and her little purple car is hidden somewhere in the side streets. A ’67 punch buggy that looks a little worse for wear on the outside, and has been completely revamped on the inside. Everything from new seats to a CD player, though the horn has been moved to a little switch on the dash as is common with older models, because the steering wheel has cracks from decades and decades of people before Kate was even born venting their frustrations with the traffic. Phil has no idea how much of the makeover happened before Kate bought the car, whether the original steering wheel is part of her design or some odd nuance of the owners before her. 

Phil is older than the car, has had just as many new parts shoved into him in recent years. He likes the little beetle, likes the way Clint crawls between the two front seats and sprawls into the back rather than pushing the passenger seat forwards like a regular person. Likes that Kate always tells Clint to sit in the back when Phil is with them. The way Clint always leans forwards with his hands gripping the front seats, his fingers brushing against Phil’s shoulder and tangling in Kate’s hair as she barrels through the streets.

“Dinner and a movie,” Kate says when everyone is buckled in and escape routes are limited.

“What movie?” Clint asks.

“I don’t know,” Kate replies.

“Where would you like to eat?” Phil asks.

“Wherever’s open.”

“What’s the occasion?” Phil asks as Kate brakes suddenly for a red light.

“No occasion,” she answers, and Phil knows that’s not the exact truth but he lets it slide. 

There’s a movie megaplex at a nearby mall, and a chain diner by the entrance has good enough lighting and plenty of room between the tables. Kate assures him that the food is good, and Phil agrees that’s also an acceptable reason for choosing a place to eat. Kate grabs menus from the counter, and Phil and Clint claim a table by the wall, sitting opposite one another with a third chair pulled over for Kate. She drops one of her feet on top of Phil’s after she sits down, and judging by the way Clint shifts in his own chair there’s an aggressive version of footsies being played out between them. Phil orders pancakes with bacon, and a coffee. Kate orders a chicken salad and a chocolate milkshake. Clint has a burger and a beer, and when the food arrives he pulls out what little salad there is and piles the thick fries that fill up his plate between the patty and the bun. 

Phil doesn’t want to talk, is glad that Clint and Kate tell him about their week without prompting, Kate interrupting Clint when he gets something wrong and Clint occasionally taking the wind out of her sails without any malice. They both have such a direct way of speaking, but at the same time they’re both experts at leaving important things unsaid. Perhaps another night Phil would be analysing their words, looking for the shape of the elephant chaperoning them. He’s happy enough to eat and let the pair of them wash over him. Happy enough.

Clint asks what the last film Phil saw at an actual cinema was, and Phil has to pause, searching through creaking memories. There was an assassination at Tribeca a few years ago, but Phil can’t remember what the film was. He’d hidden in the dark years before that, slouched low in a seat with a gun gripped in sweaty hands and Maria’s voice in his ear trying to talk him through the sweating shakes the dart in his arm had given him. A children’s cartoon twisting and warping on the screen in front of him, and to this day animated foxes make him uneasy. Phil flexes his fingers, feels a raw scab on his forefinger threaten to crack. He suspects that nothing business related would count, and so he lightly concedes that he can’t remember. 

They stand back from the box office, watching the names of the latest films scroll across a black screen in LEDs of green and red. Kate is the one who manages to keep up with such things, but even she is struggling to name which actors are in what films these days. There’s a pause in the flow of her words, and Phil wonders if she’s recognising the future flanking her. Phil’s cold apartment. Clint’s attempts at being another face in the crowd. A bandage on her forearm concealed under her trim little jacket and Phil wonders if it itches from the dishwater she’d had her hands in earlier.

Clint suggests they see an Indian street dance film, and Kate has already agreed and pushed them into the line for tickets by the time Phil has realised that it’s the only film showing that is guaranteed to have subtitles. Kate buys an extra large popcorn combo, two giant drinks that are each of a greater volume than Phil probably drinks in a day. They’ve just eaten and there’s no way they’ll make it through the hot salt and butter of the popcorn. Two drinks in a combo because of course the world isn’t built for three, is designed with pairs in mind, neat multiples of two and Phil is ready to make his excuses and slink home to his mess of a bed and his too many towels and his laundry basket that should really be set alight when Kate links her arm through his, when Clint puts his hand on Phil’s back and hands their tickets to the bored boy manning the entrance to the dark little warren of screens and speakers.

Three seats in the middle of the row, closer to the front than the back because that’s where the exits are. Phil seated between them with Kate on his left and Clint on his right, two impossibly huge cups of drink in each cup holder affixed to his chair and the popcorn is on his lab because he’s the safe middle ground between people who eat on instinct now. Clint will cram a whole handful of popcorn in his mouth while Kate grabs a fistful and then eats it one kernel at a time. Phil holds the bucket carefully with both hands, plants his feet so it can rest flat on his thighs, wonders what the goal of this little mission is because every now and then he blinks and remembers who he is and wonders what he’s doing there between them. He hasn’t slept in days. His coat is too warm in the cinema. He smells like mint and lime and cola with too much ice, and the cartoon on the screen advising them to turn off their mobile phones twists and wavers in his vision.

The story isn’t complicated. Phil wonders how many people he would disturb if he tried to shrug out of his jacket. His head bobs and Clint steals the popcorn from him, and there’s a mess of colour being thrown across the screen that makes the back of his neck prickle. Talented young things move their bodies in way that Phil would envy if he could just appreciate the art of it. A soundtrack of thumps and shudders and noises never heard in the wild. His empty hands rest in his lap and Kate reaches under the armrest and slides cool fingers across his palm. On screen a man is yelling into a mobile phone and Phil sympathises with him despite being unable to remember the character’s name, if he’s good or bad. No one is simply good or bad. Phil tugs Kate’s scarf from his sweaty neck and it falls to the floor, is swallowed up by the shadows between his knees and the seat in front of him. Phil tries to search it out with his eyes, but his head bobs and he’s too warm and the smell of mint and butter floating around him is comforting because it’s so unlike the past six days.

He jerks awake again as Clint shifts the arm rest between them, pushing it back and out of the way despite the protesting stiffness of the hinge. Phil can remember when cinemas used to have love seats down in the front row, rather than the DIY option. He wonders what’s wrong but then Clint is slipping an arm around Phil’s shoulders – not even a yawn to accompany the move? How base – and Kate is tugging Phil’s knee closer to her and sliding one of her legs across his lap, and Phil wants to ask what’s going on but he doesn’t want to be one of those assholes who talk during movies and the Hawkeyes seem to have some master plan that they’re executing, seem to know what they’re doing. Clint is warm skin and bruised muscle and his lips move a little as he watches the film which is how Phil knows that he’s tracking the mouths on screen and trying to translate himself rather than reading the subtitles. Kate is still holding his hand. Have they ever held hands before? Hawkeyes are creatures unsurpassed in getting Phil out of his clothes and pressed between skin, but he’s not sure they’ve ever done something so simple without bared necks and sharp breaths establishing the context, pardoning the need to grip, to fill hands with something that can pass as solid for at least a moment. Phil blinks, and forgets to open his eyes.

The film ends with a bang, and Phil jerks upright with wide eyes and a tight chest. The entire cast striking a pose with coloured dust creating charming stains on white clothing and Phil has to swallow several times for the blues and yellows and greens to register in his mind, to see the full spectrum. He scrubs a hand over his face and feels sheepish. Feels the wrong size for the space between two sets of wings. 

“Was it a good movie?” he asks.

“You loved it,” Clint replies, though that wasn’t what Phil was asking at all.

“It’s your new favourite,” Kate agrees.

“Oh, good,” Phil says, manages to untangle himself from hands and arms. 

The air outside is cold, and Phil realises too late that Kate’s scarf is still lost to the sticky floor between rows of seats. He’s sweating under his jacket and quietly annoyed that it’s so hard to see the stars in New York. He could be anywhere. Could be in a giant box with a city held inside and perhaps no one will notice until morning when the sun fails to rise. He swallows, scrubs a hand over his face again and Hawkeyes laugh and shove one another across the parking lot, taunting one another into acrobatics. Clint is clumsier walking on his hands than Kate, but Clint also has his open jacket tangling around his arms, has one hand bandaged up and Phil watches his progress and tries to decide whether the injury is a sprained wrist or a cut palm. No stars in New York but the yellow street lights catch on the silk of Kate’s hair and the shine of Clint’s teeth and Phil’s vision blurs for a moment, blinded by such chipped and cracked jewels.

Clint climbs into the back seat. Kate buckles herself in. Phil sinks into a soft bucket seat that should be hard and cracked leather except there’s no stopping progress and there’s an art to rebuilding broken things and the grumble of the engine catching obscures the stutter of his breath as he exhales.

He tries to say goodnight to them at his building but Clint has his keys and Kate has his hand and his silence is less anger and more embarrassment at the way he trips up the steps, at the way he hesitates at the darkness of the doorway leading into a space that is small and secure and should be familiar.

Kate brushes her teeth before bed while Clint settles for gargling with mouthwash and spitting it into the kitchen sink. Phil thinks to shrug out of that too-hot jacket but it gets caught halfway down his arms and he can’t make it drop any further because the thought enters his head that he could just leave. He could walk out the door and keep walking and it would be okay. People would be okay and the world would be okay and Clint and Katie would be fine because there’s certainly enough towels to tide them over for a few months, for the rest of their lives. The door is close and the room is dark and when Clint and Kate reach for him and strip him with careful, objective movements they both smell like antiseptic mint, the retching reek of perfect hygiene. Phil swallows, swallows again.

Kate curls close, her cheek pressed against Phil’s chest, the wet heat of her breath against his skin neatly outlining the rectangle of a transparent medical dressing. Clint is a solid weight at Phil’s back, lying high on the bed so the back of Phil’s head fits against Clint’s neck. When he speaks Phil can feel the shift of Clint’s vocal chords against his scalp. It must be uncomfortable. They must both be so uncomfortable.

“Good mission?” Clint asks.

“It was alright,” Phil replies, eyes open, tracking the little sources of light in his apartment. “Got what we needed.”

“You were off comm for three days.”

“I was gone less than a week,” Phil replies, because it’s true. Four days in the field, two at SHIELD. Kate grips Phil’s side, curls in closer and Phil isn’t sure what to do, isn’t sure if putting a hand on her shoulder would be a hindrance or a help.

Clint dips his head and presses a kiss to Phil’s hair. What an abundance of affection showered upon him and Phil doesn’t know how to explain that he doesn’t need it, that they don’t have to humour him, what they have is fine. “Five days too long,” Kate says from somewhere between Phil’s lungs.

One day setting up. Three days of deviation and then an airlift out. Twelve hours going through medical and psych, explaining that he —knew— that the clusterfuck wasn’t his fault. Thirty hours raising hell and refining protocol and gnawing at the blister the trigger of his gun had left at the first joint of his finger because of course it was. Of course it was his fault, the blood in the dirt, the feeling of rocks digging into his knees and his palm as one hand held his skin together, as he tried to shake off the feeling of hands peeling him open just to see—

“I lost your scarf,” he says into the dark room. “Tonight. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll get a new one,” Kate mumbles.

“I’m sorry,” Phil repeats. 

Kate puts a hand on his cheek, tilts his head down so she can clumsily press her mouth against his, clumsy because there’s no teeth and no tongue and no hot promise of the confidence of youth. Clint presses his nose to Phil’s hair, nuzzling him with small movements that do nothing to hide the tension in Clint’s torso. 

They don’t know how to comfort him.

They have no idea what they’re doing and even though the knowledge makes Phil’s chest shudder he grins into Kate’s chaste kiss, feels her lips slip against his teeth and the bandage at Clint’s wrist squeeze against the soft skin of Phil’s side as Clint wraps an arm around him. None of them know what they’re doing.

“I hope you enjoyed the movie,” he says when Kate slides away from his mouth, when she presses cautious and childish kisses along the plastic edge of the dressing.

“It was great,” she says, her voice oddly clear in the stillness of his little studio. Phil is the only one of them murmuring in the dark, the only one not shining under those little points of light that betray the presence of a microwave, a digital alarm clock. “My dates were jerks though.”

“Hey,” Clint protests, and Kate reaches around Phil to jab Clint in the ribs, and that’s better. That’s familiar. Phil laces his fingers through Clint’s, puts both of their hands on the swell of Kate’s hip. He sleeps for a day, feels warm and safe in a nest that is full but not straining. Sleeps through the night and there is sun in the sky the next morning and Clint puts a bandaid on his finger and Kate makes coffee and she and Phil drink out of the purple mugs and Clint sips it straight from the pot. 

There are Hawkeyes in his apartment, and even though they show no signs of shifting Phil wonders if he can convince them to stay.


End file.
